


Roses

by Pragnificent (PragmaticHominid)



Category: Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Disabled Character, Disabled Character of Color, Nonbinary Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-23
Updated: 2014-11-28
Packaged: 2018-02-26 16:53:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2659409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PragmaticHominid/pseuds/Pragnificent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tyb Hawke brings Darlyn Tabris some bad news. </p><p>DAI spoilers inside.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Darlyn Tabris has a traumatic brain injury. Tyb Hawke has kyphosis and is nonbinary.

**I.**

Darlyn Tabris keeps Nelaros’ ring. 

It doesn’t mean anything to her, but she is pretty sure that it ought to, so she keeps it. 

**II.**

"Do you know what this is?" Alistair asks her. 

It’s a simple question but the answer eludes Darlyn, as the names of simple objects often do. The word for it sits just beyond her grasp, taunting her. 

Alistair does not become impatient with her, and that makes it so much easier for Darlyn to keep from becoming frustrated by these moments of enforced inarticulateness. 

He coaxes her gently until she finds the word for herself. 

"It’s a rose," she tells him, and Alistair nods and explains what the rose means. 

As it turns out, it means everything. 

**III.**

Hawke doesn’t look Darlyn in the eyes when they tell her, “Alistair isn’t coming back.”

Red explosions go off behind Darlyn’s eyes. The blow is staggering, as shocking as the kick from the horse that fractured her skull all those years ago. The world seems to shift beneath her feet and she thinks that she ought to scream - that she would very much like to be screaming - but the sound is caught in her throat, choking, and because Hawke still cannot look at her they don’t see it coming when Darlyn leaps at them, pounding and clawing at their scarred face. 

There’s blood. Hawke lifts their hands and from the blood springs a barrier that drives Darlyn backwards and almost off her feet. She throws herself at it, driving her fists against the barrier again and again, and soon it’s her own blood that sizzling into vapor against the shimmering wall. 

All the strength goes out of Darlyn all at once and she falls down to her knees, curls in on herself. 

The barrier comes down and Hawke comes closer, crouches down beside Darlyn. They pinch their bloody nose, which they are fairly certain has just been broken for the third time in their life, and watch Darlyn carefully. They don’t speak and they don’t try to touch her. Hawke waits. 

Darlyn could not have said what Hawke wanted. She is sure that there is something - probably a lot of somethings - that she should be saying, but nothing comes to her. Words wouldn’t be good enough, she thinks, even if everything didn’t get tangled up on the way from her brain to her mouth. 

"Sorry," she says, testing the word out. She isn’t certain that it’s right.

This time Darlyn is the one who isn’t looking, so she doesn’t see Hawke’s lopsided shrug, which she probably wouldn’t have been able to parse in any case. Hawke isn’t entirely sure what they themself meant by the gesture, but they add, “Don’t worry about it.”

**IV.**

After a while Darlyn gets up and walks away, and Hawke follows her.


	2. Chapter 2

V. 

The Champion of Kirkwall’s right leg drags when they walk. The staff they carry is as much a cane as a weapon. Once Darlyn starts up the rocky and steep rise, Hawke is quickly left behind. 

Darlyn reaches the crest and steps up to the edge of the cliff.

There is a tangle of roses growing down there, many hundreds of feet below her. From her, Darlyn can make out blurry dots of color - reds and whites and yellows - among the green leaves. 

The petals are soft, Darlyn knows, but the thorns would hook you every time. 

Still, Aistair had thought them worth it. Together they’d circled around the rise to reach those roses at least a dozen times, returning to the little house with armloads of blossoms. 

He called me a rose, she thinks. 

VI. 

The ring was still in her back pocket. 

It was Nelaros’ ring. Not Alistair’s. 

Alistair had wanted to give her a ring, but she hadn’t let him; the idea had provoked superstitious dread, as though it might bring bad luck of the sort that Nelaros had experienced.

But that hadn’t help, had it? It must have been a stupid idea, she thought viciously, all the rage welling up again. Maybe Alistair would have been happier if she’d let him give her a ring - maybe he wouldn’t have left. 

The ring was in her hand. She flung it over the cliff impulsively. 

She wanted it to land among the roses, where the vines would grow through its center, entwining it. That would be a good place for the bright little copper ring, unless the Blight came back. Then all the plants would die - it was a rare rose that lived through the Blight - and maybe some Darkspawn would spot it shining among the dead canes and take it to hammer into a crude blade or shield. 

But the ring fell among the stones instead, on an outcropping that Darlyn never could have reached without breaking her neck in the process. She put her fist in her mouth and bit it to keep from screaming in frustration. 

VII. 

Further down the rise, Hawke was shouting her name. 

They think I mean to jump, Darlyn realized suddenly. She experienced such flashes of insight occasionally; often, these inferences felt as though they had come from and outside force rather than her own mind.

Darlyn waited until Hawke was close enough to hear her. “I’m just looking at the roses.”

"That’s fine," Hawke said. "But you’re too close to the edge, Darlyn. Be careful."

Darlyn didn’t think she was too close, and she told Hawke so. 

"That’s fine," Hawke said again. Had Darlyn been able to read them better, she might have known that when Hawke said something was fine it always meant that it wasn’t, but she took the words at face value. "I’m afraid that I’d fall though, so can you just come over here?" 

"It didn’t help anyway," Darlyn said, turning her back on the roses. 

She felt gutted. There was a black chasm inside her, filled with screaming, and there was no way to let it out. She tried to explain this to Hawke, but the words were slow. They stumbled over one another. Hawke seemed to be listening carefully, at least. 

Darlyn was rarely sure just how much of what others did and said she understood correctly. It was often hard to tell if others understood her at all. She needed very badly to be understood now. 

"Is that right?" she asked, deeply worried about the answer. "Is that what a person’s meant to be feeling now?"

Hawke was thinking about Bethany, and about their mother, about every person along the way that they’d want to save and couldn’t. Alistair was the newest name on a long list, and the guilt and shame were nearly suffocating. 

"I don’t know if it’s right or not," Hawke said. "But I know what that feels like." It was weake comfort and they knew it, but Hawke could think of nothing better to say. 

It seemed to help, at least, and they were glad for that much.


End file.
